Complications in Scholarly Hypertext

by Sebastian Benthall

I’ve got a lot of questions about on-line academic publishing. A lot of this comes from career anxiety: I am not a very good academic because I don’t know how to write for academic conferences and journals. But I’m also coming from an industry that is totally eating the academy’s lunch when it comes to innovating and disseminating information. People within academia are increasingly feeling the disruptive pressure of alternative publication venues and formats, and moreover seeing the need for alternatives for the sake of the intellectual integrity of the whole enterprise. Open science, open data, reproducible research–these are keywords for new practices that are meant to restore confidence in science itself, in part by making it more accessible.

One manifestation of this trend is the transition of academic group blogs into academic quasi-journals or on-line magazines. I don’t know how common this is, but I recently had a fantastic experience of this writing for Ethnography Matters. Instead of going through an opaque and problematic academic review process, I worked with editor Rachelle Annechino to craft a piece about Weird Twitter that was appropriate for the edition and audience.

During the editing process, I tried to unload everything I had to say about Weird Twitter so that I could at last get past it. I don’t consider myself an ethnographer and I don’t want to write my dissertation of Weird Twitter. But Rachelle encouraged me to split off the pseudo-ethnographic section into a separate post, since the first half was more consistent with the Virtual Identity edition. (Interesting how the word “edition”, which has come to mean “all the copies of a specific issue of a newspaper”, in the digital context returns to its etymological roots as simply something published or produced (past participle)).

Which means I’m still left with the (impossible) task of doing an ethnography (something I’m not very well trained for) about Weird Twitter (which might not exist). Since I don’t want to violate the contextual integrity of Weird Twitter more than I already have, I’m reluctant to write about it in a non-Web-based medium.

This carries with it a number of challenges, not least of which is the reception on Twitter itself.

.@sbenthall but for real, next time why not just a picture of you trying to suck your own dick? Easier for everyone.

What my thesaurus and I do in the privacy of our home is our business and anyway entirely legal in the state of California. But I’ve come to realize that forced disclosure is an occupational hazard I need to learn to accept. What these remarks point to, though, is the tension between access to documents as data and access to documents as sources of information. The latter, as we know from Claude Shannon, requires an interpreter who can decode the language in which the information is written.

Expert language is a prison for knowledge and understanding. A prison for intellectually significant relationships. It is time to move beyond the institutional practices of triviledge

Is it possible to get away from expert language in scholarly writing? Naively, one could ask experts to write everything “in plain English.” But that doesn’t do language justice: often (though certainly not always) new words express new concepts. Using a technical vocabulary fluently requires not just a thesaurus, but an actual understanding of the technical domain. I’ve been through the phase myself in which I thought I knew everything and so blamed anything written opaquely to me on obscurantism. Now I’m humbler and harder to understand.

What is so promising about hypertext as a scholarly medium is that it offers a solution to this problem. Wikipedia is successful because it directly links jargon to further content that explains it. Those with the necessary expertise to read something can get the intended meaning out of an article, and those that are confused by terminology can romp around learning things. Maybe they will come back to the original article later with an expanded understanding.

Hypertext and hypertext-based reading practices are valuable for making ones work open and accessible. But it’s not clear how to combine these with scholarly conventions on referencing and citations. Just to take Ethnography Matters as an example, for my article I used in-line linking and where I got to it parenthetical bibliographic information. Contrast with Heather Ford’s article in the same edition, which has no links and a section at the end for academic references. The APA has rules for citing web resources within an academic paper. What’s not clear is how directly linking citations within an academic hypertext document should work.

One reason for lack of consensus around this issue is that citation formatting is a pain in the butt. For off-line documents, word processing software has provided myriad tools for streamlining bibliographic work. But for publishing academic work on the web, we write in markup languages or WYSIWIG editors.

Since standards on the web tend to evolve through “rough consensus and running code”, I expect we’ll see a standard for this sort of thing emerge when somebody builds a tool that makes it easy for them to follow. This leads me back to fantasizing about the Dissertron. This is a bit disturbing. As much as I’d like to get away from studying Weird Twitter, I see now that a Weird Twitter ethnography is the perfect test-bed for such a tool precisely because of the hostile scrutiny it would attract.

On the subject of “contextual integrity” and scholarly conventions for referencing and citations.

Pre-web hypertext included a quote-in-context citation link, whereby one could click on a link to see a quote in its original context.
This extremely important link type does not yet exist in current HTML.

-What’s not clear is how directly linking citations within an academic hypertext document should work

I think I have a solution.
The result of which is a link that will ShowQuoteInOriginalContext.
The link is created by and shown by a Safari extension I wrote called ShowQuoteInContext, a CitationLinker.